Many here are missing the point because it seems there is a little lack of education both in bioengineering and Judaism on behalf of those commenting.
I am both Jewish and a forensic scientist. The meat that the rabbi is speaking of is synthetic. It is not pork in any way, shape or form.
While it is cultured from stem cells and myoblasts and myosatellite cells of meat, they are not the original meat any longer.
It is much like the medications we often use that are based on natural substances but are synthisized instead, such as carbidopa and levodopa are synthesized for Parkinson’s patients. They need the real things, but the synthetic versions are better, far purer, and cheaper to produce. They work better than the natural substances since you can control the potency of the carbidopa and levodopa in the synthetic versions. But there is no real carbidopa or levodopa in the pills at all.
The same is true of the synthetic meat. It is made in the same way. The result is a meat that is pure, non-pork, not really meat at all. Therefore it qualifies as parve, or neutral when it comes to kosher certification. This means it can be eaten with milk as it is synthetic. The cells were taken from a dead pig, but they were only stem cells or myoblasts or muscular cells that do not differ from other types of edible meat tissue from other animals on the cellular level.
On the microbiological scale these cells are not different from beef and can even be synthesized to be beef-like of even something like chicken or fish. Or they can be made into a meat product that is unique unlike anything ever tasted before.
So this is what we’re dealing with. Microbiological synthesis doesn’t create the same substance necessarily. In fact, there has been an ongoing debate as to whether synthetic meat can even be marketed as “meat” to the public.
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